That's Interesting
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No Payment, No Problem: Bizarre New World of Consumer Debt
10th August, 2020The New York Fed released a doozie of a household credit report. It summarized what individual lenders have been reporting about their own practices: If you can’t make the payments on your mortgage, auto loan, credit card debt, or student loan, just ask for a deferral or forbearance, and you won’t have to make the payments, and the loan won’t count as delinquent if it wasn’t delinquent before. And even if it was delinquent before, you can “cure” a delinquency by getting the loan deferred and modified. No payment, no problem.
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Recent COVID-19 Spike and U.S. Employment Slowdown
05th August, 2020The coronavirus pandemic continues to affect employment across the United States. In a previous blog post, we explored the idea of forecasting weekly changes in employment using data from Homebase, a data set that reports changes in employment daily. In this article, we discuss our updated forecasts for employment using this technique and investigate whether the recent changes in the labor market are related to the spike in COVID-19 cases across the country since June.
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6 Miles Davis Albums That Changed Music
28th July, 2020Miles Davis died in 1991, but his influence on music is still being felt. The new film Miles Ahead, produced, co-written, directed by and starring Don Cheadle, is giving a new audience a fresh take on one period in the musician’s career.
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A Previously Unreleased Thelonious Monk Concert Is Coming Next Month
28th July, 2020The summer of 1968 looked like the summer of 2020. Americans were in the streets protesting racism, among other things. And a high school student in Palo Alto, Calif., got in on the action by enlisting the help of a jazz legend. Danny Scher came up with the idea to book Thelonious Monk to play his school’s auditorium and now, a professional recording of this concert will be released publicly for the first time on July 31. The album is called Palo Alto.
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FRBSF – The Fog of Numbers
20th July, 2020In times of economic turbulence, revisions to GDP data can be sizable, which makes conducting economic policy in real time during a crisis more difficult. A simple model based on Okun’s law can help refine the advance data release of real GDP growth to provide an improved reading of economic activity in real time.
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FRBSF – The Rising Cost of Climate Change: Evidence from the Bond Market
20th July, 2020The level of the social discount rate (SDR) is a crucial factor for evaluating the costs of climate change. This paper demonstrates that the equilibrium or steady-state real interest rate is the fundamental anchor for market-based SDRs.
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The Symmetry and Chaos of the World’s Megacities
22nd June, 2020Architectural photographer Ryan Koopmans spent the past decade shooting hi-res photographs of the world’s biggest cities. The results are mind-blowing.
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Inside Baikonur, Kazakhstan’s Gateway To Space
27th May, 2020As liftoff nears for the first astronauts launched from U.S. soil since 2011, we take a look at the Soviet-built cosmodrome that sent more than a dozen NASA astronauts into orbit.
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